1. Social media for business costs less than traditional marketing

Traditional marketing often requires a sizeable budget for printing marketing brochures or hiring people to make phone calls. Many businesses are learning that marketing through social media, by comparison, costs much less – at least monetarily.

If you’re looking for a type of marketing that’s able to reach the most people for the lowest cost you may want to consider using social media over traditional marketing. In addition to reaching more people, not having a strong social media presence for your business can end up costing you in the long run.

2. Target your audience with Social Media

Technology is giving you the opportunity to geo-target your audiences, why are you not taking advantage? Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter allow you to communicate different messages to segmented audiences. You can geo-target audiences based on “location”, “age”, “relationship status”, “interests” and even “education”.

3. Expand your audience with Social Media

Remember word of mouth? Well, Social Media Marketing is kind of like that, but it happens online. Instead of people asking their friends about their experiences with x, y or z, they are turning to social media. Social media gives everyone a voice, an opportunity to rant, rave and review. You might as well be listening and talking back. By doing this you will expand your audience. You can also attract new customers or clients by being active on social media.

4. Social Media can increase traffic to your website

So you’ve got yourself a snazzy looking website, but how do you drive traffic to your site? Answer: Social Media! One of the best benefits of social media is that you can use it to direct your social media audiences to your website. What’s even better, is that the more share’s you get on social media, the higher your search engine optimisation ranking.

5. Generate leads with Social Media

What a fun and easy way to generate leads. Social Media paid advertising campaigns allows you to reach a broad spectrum of audiences and generating leads is as simple as creating enticing call to actions which serve as lead generation. If fact, paid advertising on social media kills two birds with one stone. Expanding your audience and generating leads!

6. Stay connected to your customers.

You know the sale is never final just because your customer has walked out your door, or because you’ve shipped your product. Social media provides an additional pipeline for their feedback, and more importantly, for you to quickly and easily respond to them.

7. Your target demographic is out there somewhere.

It’s not just for teenagers anymore. A majority of Facebook users (52%) are ages 18-34, and a majority of Twitter users (57%) are 26-44. The plurality of users of the relatively new Google+ (35%) is 26-34. The oldest demographic measured, 55+, was most represented on Pinterest (11%) and the professional networking site LinkedIn (10.5%). Women comprise 60% of Facebook users; 57% on Twitter, and 68.2% on Pinterest. Men are heavily represented on Google+ (63%), and less so on LinkedIn (55%).

8. Social media for business provides brands with more exposure and awareness

People are joining social media at nearly astronomical rates, and those numbers seem to be growing on a daily basis. The brands that are regularly engaging and interacting with their followers on social media have advantages over the others that aren’t.

Social media for business can lead to efficient “word of mouth” marketing, and provide benefit to brands in the forms of increased traffic to their websites and more leads generated.

9. Take charge of your online presence.

Like it or not, you’re online anyway. With nearly a billion people using Facebook, and more than half a billion using Twitter, the word can spread to a lot of people in a hurry. Don’t sit back hoping they’re saying nice things about you. Get into the game and create your own buzz.

10. Your competition is doing it.

Your mother may have cautioned you about jumping off a bridge if all your friends were doing it, but she probably wasn’t talking about business. With so many businesses using social media, they’re seeing positive impact in search results and siphoning off customers who might otherwise be perfectly happy with your business … if they only knew you existed.